**1. Introduction**

As human social and economic activities consume large amounts of resources, the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions produced is growing rapidly. The resulting climate warming problem has become a global issue that is critically related to the sustainable development of human society. The International Energy Agency (IEA) [1] showed that, in the past 30 years, the total carbon emissions produced in China have continued to rise. By 2018, the total carbon emissions had reached 9.5 billion tons. This concentration is still rising, albeit at a low speed, so the peak value of carbon emissions has not yet been reached. Therefore, in September 2020, at the United Nations General Assembly, China renewed its commitment to increase its intended nationally determined contributions and strive to achieve peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. "To widely promote green ways of working and living and to reduce carbon emissions placidly after peaking" [2] was listed as one of the important Chinese economic and social development goals for the 14th Five-Year period.

**Citation:** Huang, S.; Xi, F.; Chen, Y.; Gao, M.; Pan, X.; Ren, C. Land Use Optimization and Simulation of Low-Carbon-Oriented—A Case Study of Jinhua, China. *Land* **2021**, *10*, 1020. https://doi.org/10.3390/ land10101020

Academic Editors: Dong Jiang, Jinwei Dong and Gang Lin

Received: 26 August 2021 Accepted: 24 September 2021 Published: 28 September 2021

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

As the natural carrier of carbon emissions from terrestrial ecosystems and the spatial carrier of emissions from human economic and social carbon activities [3], land use is closely related to atmospheric carbon emissions. The fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that land-use change accounts for about one-third of manmade carbon emissions, and land-use changes play an important role in the increase in the global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration [4]. Choices regarding land-use structure by humans significantly impact atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions [5]. Determining how to adjust spatial patterns of land use to achieve carbon emission reduction targets is currently a research hotspot. Houghton et al. [6] summarized and analyzed 13 methods for calculating net carbon emissions caused by land-use changes. Lai [3] researched the mechanisms, characteristics, and factors contributing to the production of carbon emissions due to land-use changes in China over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, a comprehensive inventory of carbon emissions produced through land use based on land use type was developed, and a linear programming model was used to optimize land use planning to reduce carbon emissions. Liu et al. [7] constructed the LUCC (Land Use and Land Cover Change)-climate-ecosystem research system to study the effects of land-use changes on the global climate, and their results can help to determine the impacts of large-scale LUCC factors on climate change through the initiation of a budget change regarding greenhouse gases and through changes in land surface and atmosphere processes. Zhu et al. [8] developed a land-use and land-cover transfer matrix based on digital land use maps and then assigned a carbon density score to each land-use type. Finally, they quantified the spatio-temporal patterns of LUCC carbon emissions produced from 1970 to 1990 and from 1990 to 2010 in Zhejiang Province. Yang et al. [9] researched the characteristics of spatio-temporal variation in carbon storage for different land-use spatial patterns using two different scenarios in the Yellow River Basin based on the CA–Markov model and the carbon storage module of the InVEST model.

Most studies in this field have focused on analyzing and evaluating the effects of carbon emissions produced with various land-use patterns. Li et al. [10] analyzed the effects of land use patterns on carbon emissions in Jiangsu province. Zhao et al. [11] measured and analyzed the effects of land uses on carbon emissions and their spatial patterns in the Hunan province. Sun et al. [12] estimated the carbon emission intensity on land-use patterns of 31 provinces in China, revealing its rules of spatial-temporal evolution and discussing its spatial association at provincial scale with the methods of spatial autocorrelation. The law of carbon emissions produced with land-use changes and existing problems in different areas have been revealed clearly. However, a few studies have forecasted the variation trend in future carbon emissions from the perspective of the spatiotemporal pattern of land use and predicted the optimized land-use pattern with the consideration of planning objectives.

This study used Jinhua City as an example. The aim here was to provide a theoretic basis for optimization of the territorial spatial pattern and to help carbon dioxide emissions reach their peak:

